Some of our users express that they want to stay with GNOME 2; because they like how things used to be, they run older hardware or they want a more lightweight desktop. Given that GNOME 2 became unsupported and will eventually be removed from our meta distribution due to various maintenance, regression and security issues; MATE brings back all the glory with an active development team. Their continuation of GNOME 2’s development fixes outstanding issues, brings new and useful features and keeps the good old experience alive and kicking.

MATE shared the same basic philosophies of Slackware, such as simplicity, stability, and no fixed release schedule. It will be released when it’s ready and preserving the same metaphor which is proven to be working well. MATE is also easy to be maintained and integrated on top of Slackware since Patrick Volkerding has given a solid foundation as the base layer in which MATE could fill the need of GNOME-based Desktop Environment which Slackware lack of since 2005. I’m looking forward for the evolutionary changes that MATE developers will integrate for the next major release of MATE.

MATE is a great desktop environment for those who like the old GNOME 2 experience. I greatly appreciate all the hard work that is put into MATE to keep it stable and mature yet at the same time incorporating new bits where appropriate. The effort to keep MATE agnostic in terms of the user’s operating system or distribution is also to be applauded. I enjoy being a part of the MATE SlackBuilds project, which aims to bring the MATE desktop to the Slackware Linux community. Thanks to the entire MATE team!

The openSUSE team wants to thank the MATE developers for their efforts in providing this new version and is proud to announce the availability of gnome-main-menu, which will please users attracted by a traditional and easy to use desktop. It’s a pleasure for us to work with the MATE team and we want to send them our congratulations.

MATE proudly carries the colors of GNOME 2 and continues where the project left off. In many ways and for many people MATE just feels like home. It’s simple, stable and full featured. While more recent desktops experiment with new concepts, MATE provides an environment which works exactly as you’d expect it. It’s popular with our users and it’s the desktop on top of which Linux Mint built its technology and identity since 2006. We’re very proud and very happy to support MATE and delighted with each and every new release.

During the Fedora 15/16 releases I was very dissatisfied with the desktop solutions on offer. After 10 months of using XFCE I discovered MATE and decided to build my own desktop for Fedora in December 2011. This work resulted in the first external MATE Desktop repository for Fedora and was used by many users worldwide, including Fedora spins based on my packages in Russia, Latvia and Indonesia. The corollary to this work was to bring the MATE Desktop inside official Fedora together with Dan Mashal for Fedora 18. Two releases later we have a stable and usable MATE 1.6 desktop solution in Fedora 20. MATE 1.8 is currently in Fedora rawhide and will be released with Fedora 21 in the summer of 2014.

MATE was originally created by an Arch Linux user and I am delighted that MATE is now available in the official Arch Linux and Arch Linux ARM package repositories. MATE provides a complete, fully integrated, responsive traditional desktop experience and consistent work flow on my Raspberry Pi, CuBox Pro, laptop and desktop. Brilliant!

MATE 1.8 is the result of 11 months of intense development and contains 1845 contributions by 57 people, and more than 291 translators.

12 thoughts on “MATE 1.8 released!”

Great news. I see that Tiling / Snapping have been implemented from Cinnamon to MATE. Any plans for some MATE improvements to be incorporated in Cinnamon? (Eg: Added a progress bar to the logout dialog or Cinnamon paste tool). I am not a devloper but suppose it is not exactly trivial / copy-paste but feel still porting from GNOME derivative (gtk) may be easier than KDE (Qt).
Even Wayland support for MATE could pave a way (relatively easy in terms of some amount reuse vis-a-vis MATE not having wayland support) to Cinnamon as well. Glad to hear your views.http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=60&t=151282

Clem,
I know we utilise a user guide based on the MATE desktop, but I would love to create a Cinnamon version as it’s the flagship desktop for Mint. Also, there are now so many features specific to Cinnamon that a new user would appreciate documentation that is specific to this desktop.
Is there anyone on the development team leading the documentation activities to discuss this with?
Mark

Hi, I really like Mate and the way it is going. I use Linux Mint Mate mostly on my netbook with a naturally small screen and I like simplicity. Therefore I prefer the simple Mate menu to the Mint menu (which takes up half of my screen and adds extra steps to get to all applications if you don’t want lots of stuff in your favourites). There is one feature though that I really miss when using the Mate menu instead of Mint menu: the super-versatile search function. In Mint menu you can for example type the name of any package and if it is in one of the repos, an option to install it will appear – that is so much quicker than going through terminal or synaptic. Is there any way this feature could be included in the Mate menu in a future Mate release or is it already possible by adding a custom script or something that I haven’t noticed? Thanx and keep up the good work!